Strawberry Fest promises to pack Ponchatoula

View full sizeGRANT THERKILDSEN / THE TIMES-PICAYUNEPONCHATOULA STRAWBERRY FESTIVAL What: Ponchatoula’s annual strawberry extravaganza, taking up eight city blocks and a fair grounds with carnival rides. Food and drink includes strawberry shortcakes, fried strawberries, strawberry daiquiris and smoothies, and more. No alcohol is served Friday. A parade Saturday rolls on Main Street at 9:30 a.m. When: Today, 4 to midnight; Saturday, 9 a.m. to midnight; Sunday, 9 a.m. to 6 p.m. Where: Strawberry Festival Grounds are at 301 N. Sixth St., Ponchatoula. Festival extends into downtown from the grounds. Admission: Free. Information: Visit www.lastrawberryfestival.com or call 800.917.7045. When done right, topical festivals — whether they celebrate a crop, a dish or a type of music — are a lesson in focused overstatement.

Should we eat chocolate strawberries, strawberry daiquiris, strawberries and cream, and batter-dipped fried strawberries in the same day? Probably not, but at the Ponchatoula Strawberry Festival, which starts today and continues through Sunday, it’s not only possible, it’s all but required.

The 38-year-old event is in many ways a case study for successful small-town agricultural festivals: Pick what your town does/grows/cooks best. Put it on a pedestal, hold it up and say, "This is who we are." Offer a multitude of incarnations of its form — tasty dishes, beverages, games and contests — to the public, and hope that people respond.

When the Strawberry Festival, then called the Strawberry Bonanza, began in 1972, "it was just a small thing," said Donald Lenier, a 20-year board member for the festival and its communications director.

Today, it attracts hundreds of thousands of people, including out-of-state visitors, over 2 1/2 days. Comprising eight city blocks and the festival grounds, the event creates an estimated $33 million annual economic impact for Tangipahoa Parish, Lenier said.

"About 10 years ago, it really exploded," Lenier said. "It started becoming a Southern thing, where we get people from Memphis, Nashville, Atlanta. I even got a call from people in Europe saying they were planning a trip to New Orleans and wanted to come up."

In the 1930s and ’40s, Ponchatoula was one of the country’s biggest suppliers of strawberries. Since then, market share has decreased because of the tremendous output of large farms in California and Florida, the difficulty in finding workers to pick the berries, and the trend of more and more children of farmers opting out of the family business, Lenier said.

"The younger generation is not farming like their generation prior," he said. "Getting people to pick them is difficult. It’s labor-intensive. Today’s culture is not that way."

Still, Ponchatoula is known throughout the Gulf Coast for its strawberries, as many informal distributors buy 20-plus flats of berries and sell them in roadside stands in Mississippi, Alabama and the Florida panhandle.

The decline in output does not necessarily mean a vastly reduced number of farmers, though.

"It’s tradition," Lenier said. "We’re still doing it, but a lot of people have just scaled back. For example, someone who used to have a 100-acre farm may have a 20-acre farm now."

Because of the cold winter, the harvest is just now hitting its peak, giving vendors even more product to turn into strawberry dumplings, jam, cheesecake and other assorted goodies.

The festival holds three strawberry-eating contests each day. Look for a schedule in the festival handbook, available at the gates of the festival grounds. There also is a festival parade, held Saturday morning and featuring 55 floats and marching bands.

"Around here, the strawberry is like the movie ‘Forrest Gump,’ with Bubba talking about all the ways you can cook shrimp," said festival chairman Mike St. Arnaud. "If it can be done, they have figured out how to do it."